Scalability: strong and weak scaling

Amdahl’s law and strong scaling

Gustafson’s law and weak scaling(1/2)
• Amdahl’s law gives the upper limit of speedup for a problem of fixed
size.
• This seems to be a bottleneck for parallel computing.
• Gustafson’s law was proposed in 1988, and is based on the
approximations that the parallel part scales linearly with the amount of
resources, and that the serial part does not increase with respect to the
size of the problem.
• It provides the formula for scaled speedup
scaled speedup = s + p × N
Gustafson’s law and weak scaling (2/2)

• where s, p and N have the same meaning as in Amdahl’s law. With

Gustafson’s law the scaled speedup increases linearly with respect to
the number of processors.
• There is no upper limit for the scaled speedup. This is called weak
scaling, where the scaled speedup is calculated based on the amount of
work done for a scaled problem size (in contrast to Amdahl’s law
which focuses on fixed problem size).